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The proposed Big Ten West includes the six teams located in the Central time zone -- Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Northwestern and Wisconsin -- plus Purdue, sources said. The proposed Big Ten East includes Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State, Penn State and Rutgers.

Maryland and Rutgers also aren't very good as of the most recent years.

It's actually pretty balanced right now.

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

The top 2 programs of the last 10 years (OSU and Wisconsin) are in opposite divisions. The top 4 programs of the last 10 years (OSU/Michigan and Wisconsin/Nebraska) are evenly split among the divisions. The worst programs of the last 10 years (Minnesota and Indiana) are in opposite divisions. The 4 worst programs of the last 10 years (Minneosta/Illinois and Indiana/Rutgers) are in opposite divisions.

The West will feature the 3-time defending B1G champion (Wisconsin), so how can you say it'll never win? Plus it has a historically great Nebraska program, as well as some solid Iowa and Northwestern programs. It doesn't seem that bad.

We should also keep in mind that PSU is almost certainly headed downhill as the sanctions start to kick in, and MSU is probably done being a league contender now that we're back on our feet and crushing them in recruiting.

Even if the divisions aren't 100% balanced, I don't really care. You can't make that perfect no matter what you do. All leagues with divisions are slightly unbalanced. It'll work itself out. The most important thing is that the rivalries are now all contained within the divisions, except IU-PU.

Are you seriously drawing parallels between Michigan-OSU and Michigan-Minnesota? One is routinely called the greatest rivalry in sports. The other, for all practical purposes, is basically Michigan-Indiana with a cool trophy. Minnesota has beaten us three times in the last 45 years, and very few of the games have even been competitive.

Here's a link to a Minnesota message board thread about the new setup. Try to find a single post lamenting the loss of the annual Jug game:

Here's the test: If a lot of Michigan fans actually care about seeing our annual blowout of Minnesota drop off the schedule, Brandon will hear about it and have to make some kind of a statement - "We're exploring the possibility of playing them as a nonconference matchup," something like that. I have a feeling that won't happen. (Though I wouldn't mind playing them in September if that were the case.)

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

Disagree. Wisconsin has won or shared the last 3 Big 10 championships. Was that during a down Michigan period? Yes. But they did it. Is their "golden era" over? Who knows - maybe, maybe not. Northwestern won or shared the Big 10 championship in 95 and 96. Maybe a fluke but they did it. Hayden Fry's Iowa regularly competed and won a few times as did the early 2000s Iowa. And Nebraska has no chance to ever win a big 10 championship? Please.

Is it unbalanced - yes. Is the SEEE EEEE CEEEE unbalanced - yes. They seem to do ok.

Many would agreed that Michigan and Ohio are clearly the best 2 teams in the league this year and moving forward. It was going to happen quite often.

The BIG issue is that you were going to be forced to make decisions with players, ala Denard Robinson last year. Do you sit him in "The Game" when it doesn't mean anything from a standings standpoint?

It was eventually going to taint the outcome of that great rivalry game. Coaches may coach different, players may play differently (if they're even on the field), there are a lot of things that could've happened if both teams went into "The Game" with their divisions already locked up and prepared to play the following weekend.

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

Not to mention that under the Leaders/Legends setup, we were going to always play a tougher schedule than our division rivals, and would often have to beat Ohio two weeks in a row to win the B1G title. That was not fair to us (or Ohio).

Yes this was the unfair situation in the old setup - both Michigan and Ohio, all things being equal, had the toughest schedule due to their protected rivalry. Compare to Sparty's protected rivalry with (insert laugh here) Indiana for example. That said it was actually a bonus for Ohio during this era since 2008-2011 were not competitive U-M teams but longer term it was not "balanced".

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

That has to be your only reason. Because if you say no, and assuming you're a Michigan fan. Championship games would likely going to be Michigan vs. Wisconsin by most predicitions...Penn St. is going to be terrible for awhile.

So it's the same as they would be now (with Nebraska/Northwestern also an option). So how are Championship Games going to suck?

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

I don't know about Sparty, but I certainly wanted it to be this way. Yeah, it's a bit unbalanced, especially if PSU gets back to being a good team, but the two east coast tomato cans will go a long way towards balancing things out.

How? If you're talking about what happens if/when we grab two more East Coast teams to get to 16, isn't the likely move to place them in the East with us and then move Indiana to the West to reunite them with Purdue?

Ridiculously earlt to think about this, but If it went to four pods after adding two more East Coast schools, which is what I think is what will happen, I'd like this set-up:

Pod 1: Rutgers, Maryland, PSU, hopefully strong East Coast team

Pod 2: Michigan, Ohio, Michigan State, Other East Coast team (probably not as good as in Pod 1)

Pod 3: Northwestern, Wisconsin, Purdue, Indiana

Pod 4: Minnestoa, Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois

I could see switching some of those Pod 3 and 4 schools to create more competitive balance. Each pod is matched up with another pod every year like the NFL conferences do. That's seven games, and then we play one team from each of the other Pods to give us nine games. Or split up M and Ohio and and have a protected crossover game, though I don't like that idea.

Most Spartys I know are pissed. I am thrilled. No more of this crap where we are guaranteed osu and they are guaranteed Indiana. Or where osu plays us, wisky, and 6 cupcakes. We traded nebraska and northwetern for psu and a few tomato cans schedule wise. I see this as a win for us and a small loss for osu and a huge loss for msu. The schedules will never be perfect but they will be more consistantly even with our rivals than before.

They could really just get rid of the protected cross-division game altogether and put Northwestern in the East and Indiana and Purdue both in the West. Although the purple people probably wouldn't like the travel.

I still think bitching about the Legends and Leaders thing was a lot of wasted energy.

Yeah, I'm not getting the Wisco love. Nebraska is the only historic power in the West and is the team most likely to dominate that division. Wisco has been good for about 15 years under Alvarez/Bielema and could go back to being a thoroughly "meh" team quite soon.

While the East has more of the historic powers (UM, OSU and PSU to just Nebraska in the West), I still prefer this alignment to the current configuration. I just hope that there are NO protected cross-over games and that includes Purdue-Indiana because, seriously, who outside of the Hoosier state gives a sh*t if those two play annually.

Basically, each division has two or three teams who are the realistic contenders to win their divisions each year, a team or two squarley in the middle of the pack and a couple of bottom feeders. The only real imbalance is that the winner of the East will probably be the better team in the championship game and will likely win the CG a majority of the time.

Wisconsin won the Big Ten in 2010, 2011 and 2012. That would explain the love for them.

What's the real knock on Wisconsin? That 20+ years ago, they weren't good? Yeah, but that's ancient history now. They've been consistently good for two decades. They're the only program in Wisconsin, have a great homefield advantage, and have easy access to the Chicago talent pool.

At this point I think we can consider them a conference power. I do think they made a strange hire with Gary Andersen - it could be another RR/Michigan type awkward fit - but in the long run I think they'll be good most of the time.

If Wisconsin drops someone else will rise. Not sure how old you are but 20 years ago Iowa was Wisconsin. There is always the "meh" program that rises to be "pretty darn good" just by the nature of someone has to fill that void. Also Illinois I consider the great lost wasteland - impressive school, great recruiting base, but a program that does not match what it should be. Maybe in 10 years they are the one that fills that void. Or it could be Wisconsin.

"Yeah, I'm not getting the Wisco love."

Uhh 3 straight Big 10 championships. Michigan's last 3 in a row were 90-92. I don't give a flying frack what the circumstances were, they did it, and a lot of other programs have not. Only OSU and Wiscy have run 3 off in a row in the past 20 years.

As for the East, you're taking names over recent success. MSU is on the decline, PSU is done for the next 10 years, and right now Maryland and Rutgers are pretty trash.

The B1G isn't a "stacked" conference to begin with, so unless they put Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin and Nebraska all in the same division...it's not unbalanced. They split those 4 and then also split the next tier of MSU/N'Western.

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

Really? MSU is a middle-of-the-pack Big Ten program who happens to be coming off a couple of good years after a decade or so of mediocrity. Nebraska and Wisconsin are much better programs, and are in the west division.

I dunno, I think MSU is exactly the type of team nobody wants to play. Great defense, ground and pound offense, games against them are gonna be shitty. They're not gonna have Alabama success, but they're still a tough draw

I had a great idea. Something I'd really like to see, as a season ticket holder. A ten-team division, with Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Northwestern, Illinois, Indiana, Purdue, Iowa, Ohio State and Michigan State. We'd play all of them every year (nine games) plus some quality out of conference teams like Stanford, Baylor and Missouri.

What a great idea that would be. Wait. I think we did that. Like, in 1975 (less Iowa):

That East division is STACKED for basketball. BTW, how are the basketball divisions going to work? Do they have a championship game between East/West divisions also? Or does this apply to football only?

Nice naming, but conference balance seems a bit lopsided. I mean, unless you think Wiscy and Nebraska will defy recruiting rankings and be able to keep pace with UM/OSU/PSU (post sanctions). I have my doubts, espeically given how Wisconsin is apparently unwilling to put down good money for coaches and assistants.

And the ultimate loser in all of this is, as always, Indiana. Have fun playing MSU/UM/OSU/PSU every year.

I don't think it is crazy lopsided. West has more balance within its division, East is more top-heavy.

Plus, think of it this way: Between Wisconsin, NU, Iowa one of those will be in the B10 championship just about every year. That's a lot of exposure and opportunity to build a program to the next level. I wouldn't be surprised to see those schools have some major success over the next 5 years.

You'll only have one of Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State (when they get their shit back together) in your championship game every year. That's going to hurt whoever's left on the outside's shot of getting into a playoff. Like it or not, the Big Ten ain't getting the same love that the SEC gets in that regard.

You know what? You're right AND you make excellent points. Have a cookie and feel special, because you've earned it, buddy!

Wow, this whole time I thought you were referring to Michigan St. as the team that makes the east so unfair.

PENN ST?!

They're 10 years away from being relevant again...you really want to worry about something 10 years from now when the world of college football changes every month an a half?

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

Get real. You (and a lot of the other posters on this site) are wrong about Penn State not being relevant for the next 10 years. Have you ever been to their campus or spoken with any of their students or graduates? Do you realize their 2013 recruiting class (which will probably be their worst in the next 10 years) was ranked 46th? (just behind Wisconsin at 37, Illinois at 42, Michigan State at 45, and ahead of Northwestern, Maryland, Indiana, Iowa, Purdue, and Minnesota). Most of those teams have been very relevant, at times, during the past 10 years.

" Like it or not, the Big Ten ain't getting the same love that the SEC gets in that regard."

The Big Ten does not DESERVE the same love that the SEC gets in football. It needs to be earned. It's been a ho hum conference for over a decade. Go win some national championships and respect will come. Sick of hearing the respect card. The SEC love annoys me as much as anyone but they do it on the field even if its "dirty" off the field. Until the NCAA cracks down / cares thats the way it is.

The five best programs are Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Nebraska and PSU. That works out to three in one division and two in the other, which is the best you can do - and PSU is headed for a fall with the sanctions, so it'll basically be 2-2 for the next several years, which is fine.

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

and a great benefit to having Maryland and Rutgers in our division. I think you could also easily make the argument that it gets us further into the fertile Virginia recruiting grounds too. Big benefit to get to play with 3 or 4 hours of the state every year (PSU, Rutgers, Md)

Michigan is close enough to Illinois that I doubt missing 1 or 2 games in Illinois will matter to them or their families too much since we'll have a bunch of games in A2 and games in EL, Bloomington, and Columbus every year. All plenty close enough to Illinois...in my opinion

I can live with playing them as long as we're also playing Ohio, MSU and PSU every year, and in the same division (so we're not handicapped by having a better cross-division rival than everyone else). Not to mention that Rutgers and Maryland give us good East Coast exposure for recruiting.

No it's not that balanced the past 10 years. Alabama and LSU are the class of the West. Florida the East. Those are the 3 current power programs of the SEC. Auburn had its one year. Georgia, for all its hype, is the perpetual bridesmaid. They are like the Clemson of the SEC - a bunch of preseason hype but never do it at the end. Tennessee has sucked for a decade. South Carolina has only risen due to the coach. I imagine when they made the divisions the thinking was South Carolina is garbage and Tennessee is the power in that conference with Florida. How things can change in a decade. It's been a 3 team conference at the top for well over a decade and they put a pretty darn good Texas A&M team in the stronger side to boot. And not that long ago Arkansas was a top 10 team.

Don't forget that in the not-too-distant past the East division of the SEC was the "big dog" while the West was down. Currently, it is (perceived to be) the opposite. (Personally, I think the SEC is about as evenly balanced as it has ever been right now). That is why chasing "balance" in the divisions is a fool's errand.

I actually don't think the balance is terrible. The east just has pretty much all of the consistent football powers.

The west has a whole gaggle of teams that you could probably expect to be 6-6 to 9-3 every year: Iowa, Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Purdue While the east has the football powers: Michigan, Penn State (someday), and Ohio and the absolute tomato cans: IU, Rutgers, Maryland. (and no, MSU does not count as a football power for being good for 2 years in case you wondered)

Seems like overall it's fairly balanced and Penn State may be in the cellar for another decade

This isn't that unbalanced. The East has Michigan, Ohio, I guess MSU but it's not like they're a powerhouse, and a PSU team that still has most of the effects of sanctions in front of them, not behind. And three shit teams. The West has Wiscy and Nebraska and a purple time bomb that goes off every few years. Plus Iowa doesn't usually suck.

Michigan fans who are going to religiously genuflect in front of the statue of St. Bo need to keep in mind that the Big Ten during his first glorious decade was completely craptastic. Ever hear of the "Big 2 and Little 8?" If you criticize the quality of opposition, keep in mind that you're criticizing the thing that helped make Bo a legend.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." — Mencken

Yes, I am criticizing the quality of the opposition, and I am keeping in mind that I am criticizing the thing that helped make Bo a legend.

I remember going to those games in the 1970s. I remember that the only reason you got season tickets in even numbered years is so you could get them in odd numbered years. It sucked (except for that one game at the end of each odd numbered year). Things got much better by the 1980s, especially with the change in philosophy in the non-conference scheduling. Recently, though, things have been getting worse, and that worsening is accelerating with the addition of a couple of uninspiring universities to the conference. I guess I'm surprised that it is considered controversial to say so.

Who would you add to the conference then Alton? To make it better? And you cant answer "no one" because that's not how the landscape is going. The only premier programs I can think of to bring in is Notre Dame which has rebuffed the Big 10 for decades and... (crickets chirping). Oklahoma? Texas? That ship seems to have sailed. You say these teams are uninspiring we've added which I dont disagree with but there are only about 20ish premier programs in the country and a handful are in the Big 10 and most of the others have no intention of ever moving. If you say something like "Missouri" (which just moved to the SEC) or "Boston College" I say "yawn" - its just Purdue again. Tell me who you want and who is likely to come into the conference rather than whine about who is being added.

Here is a list of the teams that would "upgrade" the big 10 IN FOOTBALL (not basketball)

I most certainly can answer "no one." It's entirely possible that the Big Ten will not expand for the next 30 years, and right now my hope is that they don't. I would have expressed that hope even more fervently 12 months ago, but the conference for some reason (yes, I know the reason) decided to ignore my advice and add Maryland and Rutgers.

The problem is that you're presenting this as a "who would you add, and you have to add somebody" argument. I reject your premises, so I also have to reject your conclusion. They didn't have to add anybody last year, and they don't have to add anybody next year. Because it would be profitable short-term to add two schools, they did.

From everything I have heard, though, if the Big Ten does expand, it would probably be in the southeastern direction (e.g., Virginia and North Carolina/Georgia Tech). It's not so great for the fans who buy the tickets, but this isn't about us any more, is it? They will add more schools when it becomes profitable short-term to add more (and profitable for the schools to make the move). I know they don't care about the product on the field, except as it relates to the bottom line. I understand that. I accept that. I do not like it.

Yes that is the downside but it will be an aid in recruiting. On the flip side while we have had some exciting games against Minnesota and Purdue I dont think they are very different programs than Rutgers and Maryland. Everyone is crapping on them but Maryland was a halfway decent ACC team early on under Friedgen and was 9-4, 8-5 as recently as 3-5 years ago... and Rugers was "MSU level" under Schiano - maybe that was their top or the move to the Big 10 will help recruiting. Is that much different than your average Minnesota and Purdue teams? Or even Illinois - nope.

Your logic is not welcome when people want to be pissed of for the sake of being pissed off.

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

What happens if, as expected, the B1G expands toward the mid-atlantic? The natural response would be to put Indiana in the West, right? Depending on who is added, the East could become even more top heavy.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm firmly in the "bring it on" camp. It's just that I think many people were willing to take an unbalanced tradeoff (presuming the divisions are actually unbalanced) to get OSU and M, and to a lesser extent MSU, in the same division. Will people be willing to accept further lopsidedness in the future when there's no proportionate benefit to Michigan?

When I was little and learning to read (this was a long time ago) my parents gave me books like "The Thirty Greatest College Football Stories of All Time." Georgia Tech was in those books. The Cumberland game, Wrong Way Riegel, John Heisman and Bobby Dodd. It may not be the greatest of programs now, but it's storied.

And with the exception of Indiana and Northwestern, that's what every B1G team had prior to this last round of expansion--they all have stories. There's Red Grange. Nagurski. Nile Kinnick, and the Fainting Irish game. All the great QBs at Purdue. I remember an interview with Keith Jackson where he talked about listening to games on the radio when he was small, and the aura of football power he felt given off anytime any Big Ten team was mentioned.

Penn State was a worthy addition in that regard. Nebraska, obviously. But Rutgers? Maryland? What's their story?

I guess, now that I look it up, that the Rutgers student body chasing the Princeton team out of town after the game makes a pretty good story, or it would if I could find more than a paragraph on it. But it wasn't part of the football lore that I learned growing up--that first game was more of a factoid than a story, and as far as the common fan was concerned they might as well have stopped playing football in 1870.

Their wiki page bears that out. The entire history of Rutgers football is split into two parts:

Finally, some common sense from the league office (both in terms of the division names and their composition). Having us in opposite divisions with OSU and playing the last week of the season (and thus possibly playing two weeks in a row) was not going to satisfy anyone in the long-term. Either the Game was going to be moved or we were, into their division. I feared the former but thankfully it's proven to be the latter.

I don't care if it's "unbalanced" or not. That's a problem for schools like IU to worry about. We can handle our business in this division, and after 2013, we'll no longer have to root for OSU to beat our division rivals (which is quite disgusting to have to do).

Otherwise we'd probably play N'Western at Soldier Field and Indiana and/or Purdue in Lucas Oil.

Byrd/Capital One isn't that bad...they just can't fill it. More seats for Michigan fans on the east coast, it'll be like going to Evanston, just bigger.

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

So I don't discredit their success, I just think it was a hell of a lot easier when Michigan sucked (damn near everyone was taking 4 of 5 from us), Michigan had a coach who liked to recruit elsewhere, Michigan didn't have it's "Michigan" identity, Michigan had the whole practicegate snafu, Ohio had sanctions, Ohio had a fired coach, Ohio had an interim coach, Weis was making a mess of ND, etc.

Again, a win is a win...but if we step back and take everything into account, it's easier to see how they got those wins.

Everyone is "full strength" now...so let's let our nuts hang and see who can man up and compete. MSU isn't getting the recruits they were getting, Drake Harris could very well be a Sparty 3-5 years ago. We're even taking their pipelines (Funchess, Ojemudia, etc.) Ohio isn't giving up the midwest. ND is going hard.

They did well over the past 5 years, but I think they're 6-6 to 8-4 for the next 5 and beyond...until something changes in their favor.

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

Since Dantonio's been there they've had two really good seasons, with 11 wins in 2010 and 2011. The rest of his years at MSU the Spartans have gone 7-6 twice (including last season), 6-7, and 9-4 (a pretty decent year), so, yeah 6-6 to 8-4 seems to be a pretty good bet. I guess we'll find out, but I also think MSU is more likely to win 6-8 games per year in the next few years than 11. Which were the aberration? The 6 and 7 win seasons or the 11 win seasons?

I don't think the alignment is that unbalanced. The East has Michigan, Ohio State, and occasionally MSU as contenders. Penn State is going to be shitty for a while. We wanted to keep Michigan and OSU together and whichever division got that combo would have obviously been the stronger division. My only complaint is that they didn't take my suggestion of naming the divisions 'titties' and 'beer'.

I am literally more concerned with Indiana. They're actually recruiting pretty well (i.e. amazing for Indiana) under whoever their coach is now. Rutgers is going to be a 6-7 win football team forever and ever, amen

Rutgers is going to look even worse when they have to play a B1G schedule (East OR West division)...no longer are the playing in the crappy B1G where they could barely get 7-8 wins.

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

I could see MSU bouncing back a little this year. They still have a good D and I bet their offense will improve some. The game against them this year in East Lansing will be tough. They basically put everything they have into the Michigan game. I will not be surprised if they pull out some crazy stuff on offense just for the Michigan game.

"If you think this has a happy ending, you haven't been paying attention."

But how do you see them (whether the divisions change or not) in the future now that Ohio has Meyer and Hoke is recruiting Michigan like Carr in his BEST years?

The Drake Harris situation should tell you everything you need to know about MSU...they're going back to where they came from. Michigan and Ohio are DOMINATING the region in recruiting.

There's also that school named Notre Dame that hurts MSU in terms of recruiting.

You ALSO have more and more SEC teams looking for recruits in the north.

“True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise — the other, loyalty.”

It's like that every year. It's a very hard game because they are so amped up for it. However, they will suffer the losses of Bell and Sims greatly. They're already putting their best LB at RB. That's how bad their situation is. Maxwell and the receivers will have to step up big time. We'll see this fall.

but really, if we were trying out say James Ross or Joe Bolden at RB right now, I would be 100% certain that the position was going to be a tire fire this year. I expect MSU's RB position to be a lot of people running into the backs of their own linemen 2 yards in the backfield

As an Iowa native, in a few ways this sucks. Good for the Hawks getting to play Wisconsin again (that was stupid as can be) but now Michigan only plays Iowa once a decade*...awesome. I've been to the Iowa-Michigan game @ Kinnick dating back to the 90's and even though there were a few breaks from the every other year cycle, once every 14 years* @ Kinnick is loose butthole. Welcome aboard Rutgers, Maryland, and Indiana (which, okay, true BigTen at least). Saying this is analagous to just finding out baseball was on steroids but this college football game is turning into a heaping pile of crap; I love it, but man she ain't what she used to be. "Fear the Turtle" is now a part of the Big Ten mottos.

East and West isn't very appealing, but at least it's neutral. Leaders and legends made us a national embarrassment. The addition of two crappy schools also hurts the conference's prestige. It's amazing that a product with so many millions of fans can limp along under such poor management.

The expansion hurts the whole conference. The Big Ten has basketball prestige because it has so many strong teams. We should be adding only strong football teams. That's the way to build a conference. The decline of the conference is something we should all be honest with ourselves about. The conference is at its lowest point in a hundred years. And they think we're going to solve it by adding Maryland and Rutgers?!

If you give Nebraska that winning percentage through the entire decade (which might be a little high since they had a couple of bad years in the decade), you get total winning percentages of .543 for the east and .498 for the west.

So whether you think this is balanced probably depends on where you think Maryland and Rutgers would slot in. If they averaged 31-49 for the decade, it would be dead even.

Not the most scientific way to do this, but I took a slightly different path - I took the overall records since 2000 and calculated the "average record" and put those into the proposed divisions to get some vague (key word) sense of competitive partiy for these. It turns out that, in this scenario, the East would have a 0.588 winning percentage and the West would have a 0.576 winning percentage in that snapshot. Each division would then have only one team whose average performance was sub-.400 since 2000, which seems fair on the surface.

If they had done the other thing that was considered as well and put Purdue in the East and Indiana in the West, then the divisions, using the same method, are skewed by a good 8% when it comes to winning percentage and the West would have the two worst performing Big Ten teams since 2000. For parity on a broad level, I think these divisions that will be voted on by the presidents and chancellors might be about as fair as it gets from a team performance standpoint if geography is the driver.

"Funny isn't it, how naughty dentists always make that one fatal mistake."

Bummer for Sparty. Mark Hollis just negotiated his program to lying in the weeds for several more years. Until such time as hell freezes over, the Rose Bowl will remain a figment of Sparty's imagination.

* No postseason games and no B1G bowl payout for 4 years (2012-2015).
* $12M fine plus probation each year for 5 years (2012-2016).
* Maximum 15 freshman scholarships each year for 4 years (2013-2016).
* Maximum 65 total scholarships each year for 4 years (2014-2017).

The biggest blow to Penn State's competitiveness, the 20 scholarship total reduction, does not even kick in until the 2014 season and lasts through 2017. They will probably not have a full complement of scholarship-quality players until 2020 or 2021.

The divisions are fairly balanced for now. If this is short term, I'm happy with it. But Penn State isn't going to be down forever, and I'm not entirely sure that Wisconsin is going to still be great 10 and 20 years down the road. What about Northwestern once Fitzgerald is gone? Are they the slightest threat to win the Big 10 a decade or two from now? For that matter, I'm not even sure Nebraska is built to compete with Michigan and ohio when both programs are firing on all cylinders. There will come a time where, if left in the current allignment, the East will far outperform the West. Although that is hilarious for sparty haters, it does make things difficult for anyone trying to win the East, and winning the West will largely come down to who you avoid from the East.

It's probably all a moot point since we'll be adding more programs in the near future. But as all of those teams are likely to come from the east, I'm still not sure how a true, geographically divided West will ever compare to a division with Michigan, ohio, and a non-sanctioned Penn State. At some point, it seems like we'll either have to give up on a geographic division or content ourselves with having one division be much stronger than the other.

Nebraska is 9th in all-time winning percentage, 4th in all-time wins ahead of Ohio. Over the last fifty years they're first in both. Over the stretch from 1969-1997 their worst season was three losses. In one stretch they finished in the top ten 19 years in a row.

You could just as plausibly argue that Michigan and Ohio State might not be built to compete with Nebraska when the Huskers are firing on all cylinders.

"Just as plausibly" meaning not at all plausibly, obviously. But any suggestion that Nebraska hasn't been in the very top class of national football powers is laughable.

Yes, they are (were?) elite. I wonder if they can keep it up now that it is much harder for them to recruit Texas since they won't be playing any games down there. Bo Pelini sniffing around Ohio for Meyer/Hoke/Dantonio scraps does not seem to be a viable replacement for Texas recruiting.

There wasn't a single player from Texas and almost no one in the Big 8 footprint outside Nebraska. Outside of half a dozen California kids and some bits and scraps from full-scale national recruiting, the whole roster is from what's currently the B1G, including five from IL and 7 from MI.

College football has changed an awful lot in a short period of time. There were several factors that combined to allow Nebraska to have the type of success they had in the 90's, many of which are no longer available. Nebraska was running the option when most other teams had abandoned it, making them THE place to be if you wanted to play that style of football at a high level. They had a legendary coach that was there for a long, long time. And it was an era where recruits chose where they'd play with prestige and tradition as a primary determining factor much more often than now. I think recruiting has changed, and I think Nebraska has lost some of what once made it uniquely appealing. That doesn't mean they can't keep winning a lot of games. But I believe Michigan and ohio are more attractive destinations for most elite recruits for a variety of reasons, and on top of that (for the time being, anyway) have better coaching staffs.

I could easily be wrong here, and any big program is really just one great coach away from being a powerhouse. But right now if I'm judging Big 10 programs based on apparent ceilings, there's the Big Two and everyone else. I think the era in which Nebraska was a top two or three program overall are behind us.

One final note: As far as "firing on all cylinders" goes, I'm not sure that most of us have ever seen Michigan firing on all cylinders, though we may once this staff has had a full recruiting cycle. We may have seen it for a brief period from Carr, and maybe early in Bo's career (though many of us weren't around for that.) But at best, the late 90's were the last time we were anywhere close to realizing our full potential as a program. So when I talk about Nebraska having a tough time keeping up, I'm talking about coaching, recruiting, and developing at a top five-ish level annually, because IMO that's where we'll be if everything comes together. Perennial national contenders, with NFL prospects on both sides of the ball playing in NFL-type systems. I don't know that Nebraska's program in it's current state shows any signs of having that type of potential. Again, one great coaching hire may change all that.

Never mind that I was talking about fifty years of excellence, not a single decade in the 90s. You claim there's no evidence that the Nebraska of the present is top-level B1G material...but here are the conference records since they joined:

Michigan 12-4

Nebraska 12-4

Penn State 12-4

Ohio State 11-5

Michigan State 10-6

Wisconsin 10-6

Northwestern 8-8

Purdue 7-9

Iowa 6-10

Minnesota 4-12

Illinois 2-14

Indiana 2-14

Looks like they're keeping up OK to me, so far.

But of course the real problem with this kind of analysis is that it looks at objective facts, and what you really seem to want to do is compare other schools to your wet-dream fantasy of a Michigan future at a level that no school in the history of college football has ever been able to maintain. Nobody's "top-five-ish annually." It's very rare for any school to even average ten wins/season over a decade or more.

is that the eastern part of the country and its recruits get opened up to Michigan and Ohio this way, and then maybe the best recruits in the western part of the conference maybe trickle up some to Nebraska and Wisconsin. So, maybe more Illinois kids drift out that way, as well as Minnesota and such.

I'm glad Michigan is in the East division, for recruiting purposes. In the traditional Big Ten footprint, we'll still be able to recruit well, and having Maryland and Rutgers on the schedule every year should help increase recruiting in those and surrounding areas.